Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [64]
That is to say, our relationship ended without the definitive, full-glottal stop of an asymmetrical dump. It was more like the slow, years-long decay of a mighty oak tree, where every few months a woodsman staggers by and makes out with the oak tree when he’s tipsy, even though the better angels of his nature say, “Why complicate things in the forest, tipsy woodsman? Didn’t you promise to stay away from that ol’ oak tree?” And then the whole affair is immortalized in a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune.
Still . . . when all is said and done, I closed out my first “at bat” without getting dumped.
As for my second relationship, the one with my wife, things are starting to sound less like a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune and more like a Keith Moon drum solo being swallowed by a Cannibal Corpse song. Yes, sadly, my wife probably WILL dump me—and dump me hard, with extreme prejudice, like how Russell Crowe expresses his feelings in hotel lobbies.
The rub is, when you’re a professional, grown-up man with a wedding band, a Roth IRA, and a funny feeling about that mole on your back; when you see all teenagers as irascible enemies of the state; when you start enjoying toast—when you get to that mature, married stage, it’s not called “getting dumped.” It’s called “getting fucking divorced.” And unlike getting dumped, getting fucking divorced ain’t free. There’s a whole legal element involved. Namely, you pay a lawyer to notarize your life as “Failure, Pending Lottery Win.” He stamps your soul with his embossing machine so you can carry within you a legally binding bruise, for all time, to your grave, you colossal loser. Also, your tax return gets more complicated.
In short, divorce is an expensive, life-shattering, and inconvenient way to learn elementary lessons about life and love.
Lessons like these:
1. The fact that you mope around your “home office,” sighing and scratching the five o’clock shadow spilling down your neck, while you “work on your screenplay in your mind,” wearing sweatpants on a Wednesday afternoon, does not mean you are a tortured creative genius. It means you are a LOSER. If you’re old enough to drive, you may no longer wear pants with drawstrings—even if they are your “dressy sweatpants.” Look respectable for your woman, even while she’s at work. It will comfort her to know you are wearing a belt. And by the way, if it’s before noon, it’s not called a “five o’clock shadow”—it’s called a “shave, you loser.”
2. The fact that you used to bake bread back in college, and now refuse to do so, even when your wife asks sweetly, longingly, does not mean you are a post-hippie citizen trying to carve out new paradigms of consumption in a post-9/11 world. It means you’re lazy. Your depression has somehow turbo-charged your entropy. Congratulations! You are now the exact opposite of a Hadron Super Collider. If you don’t act soon, and show some initiative in the kitchen, your molecules actually will leech out of your toes and stain your socks. Then you’ll have to spend money on socks! Instead, bake a loaf of bread for your wife. In fact, shoot the moon and bake her a goddamn cake. She works much, much harder than you.
3. The fact that you spent approximately 40 hours last year watching goddamn-can-you-believe-I-actually-did-this Miami Ink does not mean you revel in the twenty-first-century agora as one node of the postmodern multitude. It means you have lost your mind and secretly want to die stupid. And alone. Turn off your television, unplug it from the wall, bury it under fifty pounds of sand in another country, and spend your evenings memorizing seventeenth-century love poetry for your wife. Think about it—which will be more comforting in your twilight years: the collected verse of John Donne (WHICH YOU HAVE TOTALLY MEMORIZED) or vague memories of a bunch of tattoo-people talking about their feelings on TV?
Now that I appreciate the stakes, and understand how my shortcomings have flourished in the confines of my most important relationship, I have come to loathe my special statistic. I would